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“Why don’t you have a seat on the exam table and I’ll get your vitals. Then you can finish telling me why you’re here.”
Amy followed Dr. Davidson’s instructions, and he preceded with a tediously typical preliminary exam of her ears, nose, throat, and so forth. He even tapped her knee with the little rubber hammer like her pediatrician had done when she was a child. When he was finished jotting down notes on his chart, he set his clipboard aside and fixed her with a somewhat stern, questioning expression.
“I haven’t found anything wrong so far. Why don’t you tell me in your own words what’s going on.”
The preliminaries had provided Amy a chance to decide on the best approach to her situation, and though it was admittedly somewhat anti-climactic after all her earlier, obsessive musings, she ended up sticking with the original plan, minus the excessive flirtatiousness.
“Well, doctor, I’ve been working so many hours lately, and I’ve been getting these headaches, and they’ve been getting worse and worse and now they’re starting to make my stomach hurt too, and I think maybe I need to go home and rest a little bit.”
God dammit,she immediately scolded herself.You weren’t supposed to say the going home part out loud! You were supposed to wait for him to suggest that.
Sure enough, Dr. Davidson, who had already been looking skeptical throughout the description of her first-world problems, had actually raised an eyebrow at her final line.
Fuck.
“Well, Amy, if you’re not feeling well, no one is forcing you to stay at your desk. I could certainly write you a prescription for some Tylenol or Aleve, but you could have gotten those over the counter. I’m pretty sure you’re a big girl who knows what headache medicine works best for her, and since those are available at most every drug store, I can only presume you came to me for something else. If I was at the free clinic I volunteer for on weekends, my first thought would be you were here hoping for some pain killers, but you don’t strike me as that type, so my guess is you’re here for some sort of note getting you out of a jam you’ve gotten yourself into at work.”
“No, doctor, that’s not it at all!” stammered Amy, but her blush almost certainly gave her away. “I just… I just didn’t know who else to come to and I thought maybe you could help. I heard some of the other interns say that you were… you know, you were really good.”
What the actual fuck. Was this supposed to be the flirting plan? Because this was worse flirting than that freshman boy who had tried to ask her to prom when she was a senior. None of this was going well.
The doctor actually sighed out loud at that response.
“Whether or not I am ‘really good’,”—he did air quotes with his fingers—“is irrelevant to this discussion, because the treatment for a simple headache is the over the counter medicines I just mentioned. Which I’m sure you already knew. So, I’m going to ask you again and give you one more chance to tell me honestly why you’re here.”
At this moment, Amy perceived three choices available to her. Option one was to call it off, take the headache medicine he prescribed, and do her best to turn in whatever she could by Friday. Considering there was zero chance of having anything that wasn’t absolute dog shit in that time frame, she rejected this option. The second option was to come clean, throw herself on the doctor’s mercy, and hope he would help her out of the kindness of his heart. The third option was to double down, flirt harder, and hope that the floor tiles weren’t too rough on her knees if he decided to take her up on what she was implicitly, and perhaps soon to be explicitly, offering.
She chose option three.
“Well, I just heard that, you know… some of the other interns talk about how you’re just so good at helping them out with problems like this. That if they asked really nicely, sometimes you could help them out…”
Holy shit, she did sound like she was after Oxycodone, not a doctor’s note.
“So, you do want painkillers.”
Fuck. She couldn’t even tell if he was being sarcastic or if she was flirting so poorly he actually thought she was here for opiates.
“No, doctor, I just, you know… I just really need some time to rest a little bit after working so hard these last few months, and I was hoping that you could see it in your heart to help me out. I would be very,verygrateful…” That last part had been meant to apply to the kneeling on the floor tiles she’d thought about a moment ago, but she wasn’t sure if that came across to him.
She was beginning to realize she was actually quite bad at this. Even with Dr. Andrews, the one time he’d gotten her out of work the morning after a hangover, she hadn’t felt like she’d done a very good job of flirting with him. It was just that all he needed was two perky tits and a smile, both of which she had been able to offer.
Of all the responses she imagined from Dr. Davidson, up to and including a call to HR to report her immediately—she wasn’t sure for what exactly, but for something—his actual words came as a complete surprise and implied she was in deeper trouble than almost anything else she’d imagined.
Flipping to a new page of his chart and looking down at it, he said, “You mentioned you’ve been working really hard lately, but I see you’ve clocked in an average of less than twenty hours a week the past four weeks.”
“Well, I’ve been working from home a lot, doctor. The new policy allows…”
“Yes, I’m aware of the new policy. It’s not really my business, but when I was doing my chart review, I took the liberty of asking HR for your remote login records and it looks like you’ve worked an average of a little less than five hours a week remotely for the last month, putting you at a grand total of twenty-five hours per week. Somehow, I doubt you’re getting work-related migraines from twenty-five hours a week, young lady.”
The scolding stung and, if she was honest with herself, she deserved it too. But it was the words “young lady” that made it the clearest that she was very unlikely to be walking out of here with a note providing the excuse she needed.
In fact, it sounds like you might be walking out of here with a sore bottom.She once again told that part of her mind to shut it and did her best to think about where to go from here. Walking out was back on the table, in theory, but in practice, not only would she not have her report done on time, it was also a possibility she might have a report written up about her for trying to fake her way into getting a note. Flirting was obviously not working out for her either.
There was only one option left on the table. Honesty. She didn’t like that idea at all.
While she was fundamentally an honest person with her family and friends in her day-to-day life, this didn’t feel like some sort ofFull Housemoment where everyone tells the truth.
No, it was time to double-down.
